…the humming of the sewing machines?

Everyone busy, busy finishing the quilts for the Quilt Show? It seems a bit quiet here on our blog – where is everyone? 🙂

Well, I for one am “glued” to my sewing machine chair, every afternoon after work! Heck – the only reason I am writing this is because I finished work, waiting for hubby to be done, so in the meantime I can give myself a little luxury of web-browsing…and of course then I find interesting things that I have to share! 🙂

First, since we are all in the “finishing” mode (finishing quilts that is), I found few very useful things related to machine quilting. This blog is the one I mentioned a while ago and it has these really neat “Thread Talk from my sewing machine” occasional posts – lots of great inspiration of amazing free-motion quilting and then a good tutorial too.

OK, that first one is a bit advanced and I can already hear so many of you saying – oh, I can’t do that! Well, maybe not today, but remember – practice, practice, practice! 🙂 However, if you love your walking foot and have been doing  lot of straight stitching or quilting “in the ditch” – look at this very nice video from Wendy Butler Berns, showing a nice “twist” on good old straight stitching!

Once you are tired from all your stitching, binding and labeling, head on to this amazing site, called COLOR EXPLORER,   for some play with colors – YAY!! I really like this site! You can upload your own photo or find one you like, (or it can be fabric?), and get all the colors from it extracted as a color palette! Then you can save your palettes, you can export them, print them and –  take them to the quilt shop to hunt for fabric of course! 🙂 How cool is that!?

Here are two examples I made from two photos I took in my garden while ago:

This is a close-up of lavender flowers growing in my front yard and next to it are all the colors from it – I am sure you can see a beautiful quilt in these, right?

Or for a warmer set of colors – here is the photo of the lily growing next to my White Dawn rose bush – another set of amazing colors for a quilt, don’t you think?

You know, once the rush around the Quilt Show is over, I think I will do this once a week: find a nice photo, get the colors from it and try to design a quilt in my EQ using these colors and then post it all here on the blog…lets’ call it “INSPIRATION MONDAY”? Even better, if you venture into this kind of fun – send me your colors to post here! Or just send me a photo and I will do the rest – What do you think, would you like this? Let me know!

Just to show you that I am not only surfing the web – I did finish something! These are my contributions to our Mini quilt Auction:

These are all made using that great “woven” technique described in Ana Faustino’s book “Simply Stunning Woven Quilts” – it is such a fun technique, you can’t stop making them!

I teach this in Threads of Time too and every time I have a class, one more wall hanging is made (as I am showing my students how to do it) – so needles to say, lots of them piled on my WIP (Work In  Progress) pile… I figured Christmas and Cats – two popular things for the Auction, right?

OK ladies, my “break” is over – time to get back to the sewing machine!!

See you all soon at the Quilt Show,

Marija